Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know eBook

The palace was built on the shores of the loveliest
lake in the world; and the princess loved this lake
more than father or mother. The root of this
preference no doubt, although the princess did not
recognise it as such, was, that the moment she got
into it, she recovered the natural right of which
she had been so wickedly deprived—­namely,
gravity. Whether this was owing to the fact that
water had been employed as the means of conveying
the injury, I do not know. But it is certain that
she could swim and dive like the duck that her old
nurse said she was. The manner in which this
alleviation of her misfortune was discovered was as
follows:

One summer evening, during the carnival of the country,
she had been taken upon the lake by the king and queen,
in the royal barge. They were accompanied by
many of the courtiers in a fleet of little boats.
In the middle of the lake she wanted to get into the
lord chancellor’s barge, for his daughter, who
was a great favourite with her, was in it with her
father. Now though the old king rarely condescended
to make light of his misfortune, yet, happening on
this occasion to be in a particularly good humour,
as the barges approached each other, he caught up the
princess to throw her into the chancellor’s
barge. He lost his balance, however, and, dropping
into the bottom of the barge, lost his hold of his
daughter; not, however, before imparting to her the
downward tendency of his own person, though in a somewhat
different direction, for, as the king fell into the
boat, she fell into the water. With a burst of
delighted laughter she disappeared into the lake.
A cry of horror ascended from the boats. They
had never seen the princess go down before. Half
the men were under water in a moment; but they had
all, one after another, come up to the surface again
for breath, when—­tinkle, tinkle, babble,
and gush! came the princess’s laugh over the
water from far away. There she was, swimming
like a swan. Nor would she come out for king
or queen, chancellor or daughter. She was perfectly
obstinate.

But at the same time she seemed more sedate than usual.
Perhaps that was because a great pleasure spoils laughing.
At all events, after this, the passion of her life
was to get into the water, and she was always the
better behaved and the more beautiful the more she
had of it. Summer and winter it was quite the
same; only she could not stay so long in the water
when they had to break the ice to let her in.
Any day, from morning to evening in summer, she might
be descried—­a streak of white in the blue
water—­lying as still as the shadow of a
cloud, or shooting along like a dolphin; disappearing,
and coming up again far off, just where one did not
expect her. She would have been in the lake of
a night too, if she could have had her way; for the
balcony of her window overhung a deep pool in it;
and through a shallow reedy passage she could have
swum out into the wide wet water, and no one would